jueves, 15 de septiembre de 2016

USA: America the Illiterate

Chris
Hedges"Information
Clearing House"
- "Truth
Dig"We live in two
Americas. One America, now the minority, functions
in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with
complexity and has the intellectual tools to
separate illusion from truth. The other America,
which constitutes the majority, exists in a
non-reality-based belief system. This America,
dependent on skillfully manipulated images for
information, has severed itself

from the literate,
print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between
lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic,
childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into
confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection.
This divide, more than race, class or gender, more
than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red
state or blue state, has split the country into
radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic
entities.

There are
over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom
hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well
as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or
fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s
population is illiterate or barely literate. And
their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million
a year. But even those who are supposedly literate
retreat in huge numbers into this image-based
existence. A third of high school graduates, along
with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a
book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the
families in the United States last year did not buy
a book.The
illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they
do so without the ability to make decisions based on
textual information. American political campaigns,
which have learned to speak in the comforting
epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy
for cheap slogans and reassuring personal
narratives. Political propaganda now masquerades as
ideology. Political campaigns have become an
experience. They do not require cognitive or
self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite
pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment
and collective salvation.

Campaigns that succeed are
carefully constructed psychological instruments that
manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and
impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create
a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and
fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into
an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now
lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style
and story, not content or history or reality, which
inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy
illusions. And it works because so much of the
American electorate, including those who should know
better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles,
the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the
perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of
candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge.The
illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are
over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect
their children from dysfunctional public schools.
They still cannot understand predatory loan deals,
the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card
agreements and equity lines of credit that drive
them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still
struggle with the most basic chores of daily life
from reading instructions on medicine bottles to
filling out bank forms, car loan documents and
unemployment benefit and insurance papers.

They
watch helplessly and without comprehension as
hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are
hostages to brands. Brands come with images and
slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand.
Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because
it is cheap but because they can order from pictures
rather than menus. And those who serve them, also
semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash
registers whose keys are marked with symbols and
pictures. This is our brave new world.

Political
leaders in our post-literate society no longer need
to be competent, sincere or honest. They only need
to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they
need a story, a narrative. The reality of the
narrative is irrelevant. It can be completely at
odds with the facts. The consistency and emotional
appeal of the story are paramount. The most
essential skill in political theater and the
consumer culture is artifice. Those who are best at
artifice succeed. Those who have not mastered the
art of artifice fail. In an age of images and
entertainment, in an age of instant emotional
gratification, we do not seek or want honesty.

We
ask to be indulged and entertained by clichés,
stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we
can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the
greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with
superior moral and physical qualities and that our
glorious future is preordained, either because of
our attributes as Americans or because we are
blessed by God or both.The ability
to magnify these simple and childish lies, to repeat
them and have surrogates repeat them in endless
loops of news cycles, gives these lies the aura of
an uncontested truth. We are repeatedly fed words or
phrases like yes we can, maverick,
change, pro-life, hope or war
on terror. It feels good not to think. All we
have to do is visualize what we want, believe in
ourselves and summon those hidden inner resources,
whether divine or national, that make the world
conform to our desires. Reality is never an
impediment to our advancement.

The
Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the
Gore-Bush debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of
1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 and the
Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It reviewed these
transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that
indicates the minimum educational standard needed
for a reader to grasp the text. During the 2000
debates, George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level
(6.7) and Al Gore at a seventh-grade level (7.6). In
the 1992 debates, Bill Clinton spoke at a
seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H.W. Bush
spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did H. Ross
Perot (6.3). In the debates between John F. Kennedy
and Richard Nixon, the candidates spoke in language
used by 10th-graders. In the debates of Abraham
Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas the scores were
respectively 11.2 and 12.0.

In short, today’s
political rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible
to a 10-year-old child or an adult with a
sixth-grade reading level. It is fitted to this
level of comprehension because most Americans speak,
think and are entertained at this level. This is why
serious film and theater and other serious artistic
expression, as well as newspapers and books, are
being pushed to the margins of American society.
Voltaire was the most famous man of the 18th
century. Today the most famous “person” is Mickey
Mouse.

In our
post-literate world, because ideas are inaccessible,
there is a need for constant stimulus. News,
political debate, theater, art and books are judged
not on the power of their ideas but on their ability
to entertain. Cultural products that force us to
examine ourselves and our society are condemned as
elitist and impenetrable.
Hannah Arendt warned that the marketization of
culture leads to its degradation, that this
marketization creates a new celebrity class of
intellectuals who, although well read and informed
themselves, see their role in society as persuading
the masses that “Hamlet” can be as entertaining as
“The Lion King” and perhaps as educational.
“Culture,” she wrote, “is being destroyed in order
to yield entertainment.”

“There are
many great authors of the past who have survived
centuries of oblivion and neglect,” Arendt wrote,
“but it is still an open question whether they will
be able to survive an entertaining version of what
they have to say.”

The change
from a print-based to an image-based society has
transformed our nation. Huge segments of our
population, especially those who live in the embrace
of the Christian right and the consumer culture, are
completely unmoored from reality. They lack the
capacity to search for truth and cope rationally
with our mounting social and economic ills. They
seek clarity, entertainment and order. They are
willing to use force to impose this clarity on
others, especially those who do not speak as they
speak and think as they think. All the traditional
tools of democracies, including dispassionate
scientific and historical truth, facts, news and
rational debate, are useless instruments in a world
that lacks the capacity to use them.

As we
descend into a devastating economic crisis, one that
Barack Obama cannot halt, there will be tens of
millions of Americans who will be ruthlessly thrust
aside. As their houses are foreclosed, as their jobs
are lost, as they are forced to declare bankruptcy
and watch their communities collapse, they will
retreat even further into irrational fantasy. They
will be led toward glittering and self-destructive
illusions by our modern Pied Pipers—our corporate
advertisers, our charlatan preachers, our television
news celebrities, our self-help gurus, our
entertainment industry and our political
demagogues—who will offer increasingly absurd forms
of escapism.

The core
values of our open society, the ability to think for
oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express
dissent when judgment and common sense indicate
something is wrong, to be self-critical, to
challenge authority, to understand historical facts,
to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change
and to acknowledge that there are other views,
different ways of being, that are morally and
socially acceptable, are dying. Obama used hundreds
of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal
to and manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism
to his advantage, but these forces will prove to be
his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the
awful reality that awaits us.